I mean, the US did come in on a raid and killed a resident of a sovereign nation. I'm not sure how much Pakistan knew ahead of time; between information leaks in the Pakistan chain of command, and the need for plausible deniability to a populace that doesn't love the US, we will never know.
And didn't they buy the F117 Nighthawk wings that the Yugoslavs shot down? Again, this new sale is possibly disturbing, but not surprising.
Go ahead with this and you'll have every taxi driver, flea market, convention booth and convenience store in the country...
As long as taxi drivers exist...
A 2 seat driverless car + google maps on touchscreen + simple payments would cover 90-98% of all taxi rides, and maybe make the remaining human driver needed rides so uneconomical the taxi companies may not be able to afford drivers.
Before the 'taxi drivers can't speak english' jokes, a taxi gig is a simple job for an immigrant where they can trade their hours and health for a decent paycheck enough to possibly put their kids through school. It removes a path for 'your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' to actually make their lives better.
If your idea of "design innovation" is a rectangle with round corners then... I... I feel sorry for you. I really am.
I know ACs tend to be trolls, but... I bring up the iPod, which went from 'it will never work' to 'we must stop Apple or it will control the world', I bring up the iPhone which went from 'it will never work' to 'we need to make sure other companies get the iPhone or else AT&T has an unfair advantage with the iPhone', I bring up the iPad which went from 'it will never work' to 'hey everybody, lets copy tablets'... and you bring up rounded corners.
Apple is a design company. Of course its products will look cool. If you think Apple's advantage is solely because of industrial design, then you are missing a much bigger picture. People don't buy an iPad because of rounded corners. People buy it because it works, simply.
Of the major tech companies, Apple is best at creating things that seem simple to use. They have a simple external model that they expose to people. iOS is a microkernel, but people would never care. I don't know the filesystem for iOS, and I don't need to know. It just works, it's easy to get music, movies, and apps on it. It takes a lot of work and design to make a complicated system simple and consistent to end users. This is why people buy Apple products.
Microsoft is a pool of geeks. They don't make it easy for end users to use stuff. Take something simple like ejecting a USB device on Windows vs on a Mac. I'm a geek, and on Windows, I still need to think about what drive it is and check the volume. Google is made of geeks, and they're a bit better, because they try to be very clean. But they're still not as good as Apple in making things simple.
The community design document can be found here. They're effectively preventing anyone from creating a mobile computer device that is rectangular in shape with round corners. Unbelievable.
Apple is both competing on trademarks and design innovation. People used to say the iPod would bomb, it's done well. People said the iPhone would bomb, it's done well. People used to say the iPad... well, you get the point. Apple is willing to innovate even where it will kill current product lines. Microsoft could never do a good tablet because it's worried about the Windows franchise. It could never do a good phone because it needs to look like desktop Windows. Steve Jobs to his credit is fine selling iPads even if they cannibalize MacBook sales. He made iTunes for Windows even though not having iTunes there was a carrot to buy a Mac - he's good with iTunes on Windows as long as it sold iPods. He killed the iPod Mini for the Nano because he felt Solid State was the way forward. Apple is many things, being pathetic not being one i ascribe to it
Apple is fairly innovative, and pretty much every phone I see now looks like an iPhone with maybe a button or two. Whether you say that industrial design should be able to be protected by law, well that's a different argument. But the design element is one of the things that Apple can use, and it does.
Apple is not a computer company, nor a phone company, nor a media company. It is a design company. It designs products that work. You may think you want a company run by geeks, but then you get Windows Zune, and Squirting files, and PlaysForSure. Of course Apple will fight for it's designs.
In a weird way, in our financial society, Apple not using available trademarks may open them up to shareholder lawsuits - not doing all to protect shareholder value and all that. It's a sucky system. Apple is not manipulating it. It is using one of it's many ways to compete. In the courtroom, and in the market.
approval would extend "to so-called “lone wolf” suspects who aren’t affiliated with any terrorist group."
So, more needle in a haystack stuff, we need to violate everybody's privacy just in case one in the 7billlion people on the planet hate us. Didn't they use to hate us for our freedom? Not a problem anymore....
but it's a present where every transaction can be tracked and data-mined
FTFY.
Also, discount cards were specifically created for this data mining. Rebates also get your info. Credit Card cash back is to induce you to use credit cards instead of cash so they get their fees and can track you more.
The first Macs were very hardware dependent. With only 128K RAM to work with, a lot of the OS was in ROM (and remained there throughout much of the MacOS 1-7 evolution). Not sure of the copyright on that, whether Apple would allow such a ROM dump. With so little RAM/ROM I'm sure there were a lot of techniques to save bytes, some that undoubtedly made the code very hardware dependent, and therefore harder to emulate. Also, they were Motorola 68000 machines, not Intel.
Any emulation of it would have to overcome quite a few barriers. Not that it's impossible, just a much higher barrier to entry than Windows 1 was.
I thought this too. And the second thing I thought of it was a typo for OCAML. Then I realized there must be a thing called Apache Camel that I don't know anything about, and I doubt if others would. Then I stopped caring.
One additional benefit to (low) inflation - it pulls purchases to the present.
With deflation, you're waiting for prices to drop. So you wait, and sellers make no money, they start to panic, lay people off, sell for cheaper. Fewer purchasers mean prices go down more. Your economy slowly contracts into a deflationary spiral.
With inflation (low levels) you realize prices are going to rise, you buy your thing. Manufacturer has cash to pay employees, they buy your product... etc.
Of course hyper-inflation destroys value quickly, destroying incentive to make long term plans. There was an NPR podcast before on Brazil about high inflation days where they didn't make beer - the months long waiting for brewing destroyed the investment. Interestingly, how did Brazil solve the Inflation Expectation Cycle? Through a virtual currency. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil
One issue with deflation; it helps debtors, but not equally. If you're a debtor, you're probably liquidity constrained. So even though you gain some advantage, it's not all good. Your salary is dropping as well.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't have much to do with inflation. It was 'invented' not even by bankers, but gold smiths in 1500's in England.
Though i do think Cringely is a bit of a crackpot at times, and often broadly off the mark, he did have a point when he said Sony can try PayPal or something similar: http://www.cringely.com/tag/paypal/
This would be disruptive to the Credit Card companies, something sorely needed.
Whether you like Stallman's politics or not (i think he's a bit of a zealot, but I'm sure he'd agree and think as a compliment) there's a decent history of projects launched and ending up in some kind of Limbo someplace. Even emacs, his pet project, got forked into xemacs because of inactivity. The hurd has gone through many iterations, many underlying microkernels, and seems irrelevant. Even gcc, probably the best known and used FSF project, was forked by the egcs team and moved so much quicker than mainline gcc that it eventually became the new Guardians of gcc. Remember that The Cathedral and the Bazaar used FSF gcc development as the closed Cathedral model.
So, will this be a typical FSF project where they copy something badly (GNU gdbm vs Berkely dbm) just because they can? Or will Stallman realize that the best way to get people to use his code is to get them something actually usable, and not rely on the excuse 'well it's OPEN'.
This makes me sad, but I have to wonder how this is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.
To get meta it's not what you think matters. But it sure is something I'm glad i read.
This is the last launch of the shuttle. It was supposed to be the height of tech, yet we lost two shuttle crews and two shuttles. Losing another person before the launch just adds another layer to the sadness about the launch. Not only will we lose the ability of manned flight for some time, but a bunch of very smart engineers will be out of work. And more abstract, we lose a bit of the shine on our national tech halo.
All of this makes this launch very important, and a death now attached to it even more significant.
I don't think you're a dick, but i do wonder why you're complaining about it. To open the story and comment on it takes a lot more effort than just ignoring it completely.
Value is not measured in hours, otherwise sports stars would be making about $10k/year.
Though i agree sports stars are overpaid (they are paid as entertainers not as laborers) there are a lot of hours they work that you don't see. Look at say, Dwight Howard, and think of how many hours it takes in the gym to get arms like that.
I know it's just because I'm having a bad day, but I wish people would stop with the M$ junk. Microsoft is a publicly run, for profit company. The worst they've done is illegally tying apps to their OS, taking advantage of forcing Windows installs and network effects. I'm no apologist for Microsoft, I think they have poorly (relatively) designed products and people are rightfully leaving them as either better designed, or cheaper T.C.O.O, products come out. But assailing them for economic success doesn't make sense to me.
I never see $hell, whose policies have killed people, or even $un for that matter, whose overpriced underpowered SPARC hardware got smacked by Linux, and would have gotten smacked by BSD if it didn't.
no php developer will ditch lamp and start working on 'wimp'.
their effort is pretty much pointless.
Yes, it will be hard to get people to move, but Microsoft does have one ace up their sleeve, Visual Studio. If they can make PHP a first class citizen of Visual Studio, they will get converts. I respectfully disagree that developers think of PHP as a Linux stack. In my opinion, they just want to get things done. PHP as a language really has it's design issues (trying to be polite here). The people who pick it up are usually trying to do something quick and dirty. Visual Studio is one of the best tools for that, enabling people with almost no skill to code Visual Basic apps quickly. PHP is Visual Basic for the web.
The rewrite of Firefox as told by Spoksly - features never solidifying and nothing ever shipping. To show it's not an open source thing, the whole MacOSX post System7 Taligent/Pink/Copeland fiasco.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the US did come in on a raid and killed a resident of a sovereign nation. I'm not sure how much Pakistan knew ahead of time; between information leaks in the Pakistan chain of command, and the need for plausible deniability to a populace that doesn't love the US, we will never know.
And didn't they buy the F117 Nighthawk wings that the Yugoslavs shot down? Again, this new sale is possibly disturbing, but not surprising.
Go ahead with this and you'll have every taxi driver, flea market, convention booth and convenience store in the country...
As long as taxi drivers exist...
A 2 seat driverless car + google maps on touchscreen + simple payments would cover 90-98% of all taxi rides, and maybe make the remaining human driver needed rides so uneconomical the taxi companies may not be able to afford drivers.
Before the 'taxi drivers can't speak english' jokes, a taxi gig is a simple job for an immigrant where they can trade their hours and health for a decent paycheck enough to possibly put their kids through school. It removes a path for 'your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' to actually make their lives better.
If your idea of "design innovation" is a rectangle with round corners then... I ... I feel sorry for you. I really am.
I know ACs tend to be trolls, but... ... and you bring up rounded corners.
I bring up the iPod, which went from 'it will never work' to 'we must stop Apple or it will control the world', I bring up the iPhone which went from 'it will never work' to 'we need to make sure other companies get the iPhone or else AT&T has an unfair advantage with the iPhone', I bring up the iPad which went from 'it will never work' to 'hey everybody, lets copy tablets'
Apple is a design company. Of course its products will look cool. If you think Apple's advantage is solely because of industrial design, then you are missing a much bigger picture. People don't buy an iPad because of rounded corners. People buy it because it works, simply.
Of the major tech companies, Apple is best at creating things that seem simple to use. They have a simple external model that they expose to people. iOS is a microkernel, but people would never care. I don't know the filesystem for iOS, and I don't need to know. It just works, it's easy to get music, movies, and apps on it. It takes a lot of work and design to make a complicated system simple and consistent to end users. This is why people buy Apple products.
Microsoft is a pool of geeks. They don't make it easy for end users to use stuff. Take something simple like ejecting a USB device on Windows vs on a Mac. I'm a geek, and on Windows, I still need to think about what drive it is and check the volume. Google is made of geeks, and they're a bit better, because they try to be very clean. But they're still not as good as Apple in making things simple.
The community design document can be found here. They're effectively preventing anyone from creating a mobile computer device that is rectangular in shape with round corners. Unbelievable.
Apple is both competing on trademarks and design innovation. People used to say the iPod would bomb, it's done well. People said the iPhone would bomb, it's done well. People used to say the iPad... well, you get the point. Apple is willing to innovate even where it will kill current product lines. Microsoft could never do a good tablet because it's worried about the Windows franchise. It could never do a good phone because it needs to look like desktop Windows. Steve Jobs to his credit is fine selling iPads even if they cannibalize MacBook sales. He made iTunes for Windows even though not having iTunes there was a carrot to buy a Mac - he's good with iTunes on Windows as long as it sold iPods. He killed the iPod Mini for the Nano because he felt Solid State was the way forward. Apple is many things, being pathetic not being one i ascribe to it
Apple is fairly innovative, and pretty much every phone I see now looks like an iPhone with maybe a button or two. Whether you say that industrial design should be able to be protected by law, well that's a different argument. But the design element is one of the things that Apple can use, and it does.
Apple is not a computer company, nor a phone company, nor a media company. It is a design company. It designs products that work. You may think you want a company run by geeks, but then you get Windows Zune, and Squirting files, and PlaysForSure. Of course Apple will fight for it's designs.
In a weird way, in our financial society, Apple not using available trademarks may open them up to shareholder lawsuits - not doing all to protect shareholder value and all that. It's a sucky system. Apple is not manipulating it. It is using one of it's many ways to compete. In the courtroom, and in the market.
Masterblaster says "NO MORE METHANE"
Hmm, Thunderdome quotes may be a bit old now... shrinks back to his movie geek hole.
See through money rocks.
approval would extend "to so-called “lone wolf” suspects who aren’t affiliated with any terrorist group."
So, more needle in a haystack stuff, we need to violate everybody's privacy just in case one in the 7billlion people on the planet hate us. Didn't they use to hate us for our freedom? Not a problem anymore....
I think 99% of Americans would support this.
Unfortunately i don't. Enough people don't think and listen to 'danger from the skies!!!!' paranoia that they'd be on the TSA side.
but it's a present where every transaction can be tracked and data-mined
FTFY.
Also, discount cards were specifically created for this data mining. Rebates also get your info. Credit Card cash back is to induce you to use credit cards instead of cash so they get their fees and can track you more.
The first Macs were very hardware dependent. With only 128K RAM to work with, a lot of the OS was in ROM (and remained there throughout much of the MacOS 1-7 evolution). Not sure of the copyright on that, whether Apple would allow such a ROM dump. With so little RAM/ROM I'm sure there were a lot of techniques to save bytes, some that undoubtedly made the code very hardware dependent, and therefore harder to emulate. Also, they were Motorola 68000 machines, not Intel.
Any emulation of it would have to overcome quite a few barriers. Not that it's impossible, just a much higher barrier to entry than Windows 1 was.
I thought this too. And the second thing I thought of it was a typo for OCAML. Then I realized there must be a thing called Apache Camel that I don't know anything about, and I doubt if others would. Then I stopped caring.
One additional benefit to (low) inflation - it pulls purchases to the present.
With deflation, you're waiting for prices to drop. So you wait, and sellers make no money, they start to panic, lay people off, sell for cheaper. Fewer purchasers mean prices go down more. Your economy slowly contracts into a deflationary spiral.
With inflation (low levels) you realize prices are going to rise, you buy your thing. Manufacturer has cash to pay employees, they buy your product... etc.
Of course hyper-inflation destroys value quickly, destroying incentive to make long term plans. There was an NPR podcast before on Brazil about high inflation days where they didn't make beer - the months long waiting for brewing destroyed the investment. Interestingly, how did Brazil solve the Inflation Expectation Cycle? Through a virtual currency. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil
One issue with deflation; it helps debtors, but not equally. If you're a debtor, you're probably liquidity constrained. So even though you gain some advantage, it's not all good. Your salary is dropping as well.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't have much to do with inflation. It was 'invented' not even by bankers, but gold smiths in 1500's in England.
Though i do think Cringely is a bit of a crackpot at times, and often broadly off the mark, he did have a point when he said Sony can try PayPal or something similar: http://www.cringely.com/tag/paypal/
This would be disruptive to the Credit Card companies, something sorely needed.
A story about nothing
It's Seinfeld?
Whether you like Stallman's politics or not (i think he's a bit of a zealot, but I'm sure he'd agree and think as a compliment) there's a decent history of projects launched and ending up in some kind of Limbo someplace. Even emacs, his pet project, got forked into xemacs because of inactivity. The hurd has gone through many iterations, many underlying microkernels, and seems irrelevant. Even gcc, probably the best known and used FSF project, was forked by the egcs team and moved so much quicker than mainline gcc that it eventually became the new Guardians of gcc. Remember that The Cathedral and the Bazaar used FSF gcc development as the closed Cathedral model.
So, will this be a typical FSF project where they copy something badly (GNU gdbm vs Berkely dbm) just because they can? Or will Stallman realize that the best way to get people to use his code is to get them something actually usable, and not rely on the excuse 'well it's OPEN'.
This makes me sad, but I have to wonder how this is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.
To get meta it's not what you think matters. But it sure is something I'm glad i read.
This is the last launch of the shuttle. It was supposed to be the height of tech, yet we lost two shuttle crews and two shuttles. Losing another person before the launch just adds another layer to the sadness about the launch. Not only will we lose the ability of manned flight for some time, but a bunch of very smart engineers will be out of work. And more abstract, we lose a bit of the shine on our national tech halo.
All of this makes this launch very important, and a death now attached to it even more significant.
I don't think you're a dick, but i do wonder why you're complaining about it. To open the story and comment on it takes a lot more effort than just ignoring it completely.
Value is not measured in hours, otherwise sports stars would be making about $10k/year.
Though i agree sports stars are overpaid (they are paid as entertainers not as laborers) there are a lot of hours they work that you don't see. Look at say, Dwight Howard, and think of how many hours it takes in the gym to get arms like that.
Now it seems i can hook up a sip client on my phone/ipod and use this. This is major news to me.
Is this intended by google? This would be wonderful if this was a feature and not a bug..
Probably intentional. The fact that this happened after they closed Gizmo5 which allowed this feature, methinks isn't coincidental.
Would this necessarily mean they'd allow a SIP client to connect and receive incoming calls?
This move makes sense now that they really killed Gizmo5. In effect, they've finally pushed that feature set to all Google voice numbers.
This is the most common operating system in the world, and a big selling point is the ability to upgrade. Not all that worthless.
And it's fun.
I know it's just because I'm having a bad day, but I wish people would stop with the M$ junk. Microsoft is a publicly run, for profit company. The worst they've done is illegally tying apps to their OS, taking advantage of forcing Windows installs and network effects. I'm no apologist for Microsoft, I think they have poorly (relatively) designed products and people are rightfully leaving them as either better designed, or cheaper T.C.O.O, products come out. But assailing them for economic success doesn't make sense to me.
I never see $hell, whose policies have killed people, or even $un for that matter, whose overpriced underpowered SPARC hardware got smacked by Linux, and would have gotten smacked by BSD if it didn't.
no php developer will ditch lamp and start working on 'wimp'.
their effort is pretty much pointless.
Yes, it will be hard to get people to move, but Microsoft does have one ace up their sleeve, Visual Studio. If they can make PHP a first class citizen of Visual Studio, they will get converts. I respectfully disagree that developers think of PHP as a Linux stack. In my opinion, they just want to get things done. PHP as a language really has it's design issues (trying to be polite here). The people who pick it up are usually trying to do something quick and dirty. Visual Studio is one of the best tools for that, enabling people with almost no skill to code Visual Basic apps quickly. PHP is Visual Basic for the web.
The rewrite of Firefox as told by Spoksly - features never solidifying and nothing ever shipping. To show it's not an open source thing, the whole MacOSX post System7 Taligent/Pink/Copeland fiasco.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Yogi Berra